The Earliest Extant Complete Text of the Bible in Hebrew

The Leningrad Codex also known as Leningradensis, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Bible in Hebrew (Circa 1008), which is still preserved.
According to its colophon, the parchment codex was copied in Cairo by a person named Shmuel ben Yaakov. It was later sold to someone living in Damascus and reappeared later on in Russia.
Today the codex is in St. Petersburg, in the Russian National Library, where it has been since the mid-1800's. When the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center and West Semitic Research photographed the Bible in 1990, the city was still called Leningrad, thus the name of the codex.
The Leningrad Codex is considered one of the best examples of the Masoretic text which is the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible.

Click to watch the full Leningrad Codex.


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